In the
discourse of local government law, the idea that a mobile populace can
“vote with its feet” has long served as a justification for devolution
and decentralization. Tracing to Charles Tiebout’s seminal work in
public finance, the legal-structural prescription that follows is that a
diversity of independent and empowered local governments can best
satisfy the varied preferences of residents metaphorically shopping for
bundles of public services, regulatory environment, and tax burden.

This
localist paradigm generally presumes that fragmented governments are
competing for residents within a given metropolitan area. Contemporary
patterns of mobility, however, call into question this foundational
assumption. People today move between — and not just within —
metropolitan regions, domestically and even internationally. This is
particularly so for a subset of residents — high human-capital knowledge
workers and the so-called “creative class” — that is prominently
coveted in this interregional competition. These modern mobile residents
tend to evaluate the policy bundles that drive their locational
decisions on a regional scale, weighing the comparative merits of
metropolitan areas against each other. And local governments are
increasingly recognizing that they need to work together at a regional
scale to compete for these residents.

This Article argues that
this intermetropolitan mobility provides a novel justification for
regionalism that counterbalances the strong localist tendency of the
traditional Tieboutian view of local governance. Contrary to the
predominant assumption in the legal literature, competition for mobile
residents is as much an argument for regionalism as it has been for
devolution and decentralization. In an era of global cities vying for
talent, the mobility case for regionalism has significant doctrinal
consequences for debates in local government law and public finance,
including the scope of local authority, the nature of regional equity,
and the structure of metropolitan collaboration.